Damned Good Show - 3 Reviews
Damned Good Show Nicholas Lezard The Guardian 5th October 2005
It would be nice to think of one of our more hawkish ministers picking up this book while contemplating flattening Mesopotamia from above. It's about a bomber squadron during the early days of the second world war, so we won't pretend it will make them think again: we just want them to be discomfited by Derek Robinson's pure, serenely bolshy voice. Or rather, not so much bolshy as awkward squad. The kind of person who makes the top brass chew their imaginary moustaches in frustration.
There's a superb character called Skelton, a don turned RAF intelligence officer who keeps getting booted around the country for daring to tell his superiors the truth. "The truth does not cease to be the truth because men prefer to think otherwise," he says. "If they heard him," adds Robinson of his audience, "they gave no indication of it."
Robinson found his genius in the early 1970s, with a tight little novel about the Royal Flying Corps in the first world war, Goshawk Squadron. This had as its central character the splendidly unsympathetic Woolley, a man utterly impatient with all the civilised proprieties except teaching his men to stop being killed. The novel found its way on to the Booker shortlist, at a time when the selection process seemed rather more experimental than it is now.
Nothing Robinson has done since has been as good, largely because once you invent a Woolley, there's nowhere to go but backwards. Still, he won't give up, and, occasional forays aside, mostly ploughs adjacent furrows of his chosen field.
Here is what you don't get in a Robinson war novel: wide-canvas narratives, interlocking stories of love and loss, the literary ambition to write the Great War Novel. He's not Faulks or de Bernières. Here's what you do get: tough, taut prose that pulls you through the book like a steel cable, close-up examination of the details of pilots' duties, the acrid tang of veracity.
His books are free of frills or nonsense, though after a while you wonder if everyone's dialogue during the war was so mordant and grimly funny, or if a bomber crew without a compass ever identified Hanover by remembering their Browning: "The River Weser, deep and wide,/ Washes its walls on the southern side." But who cares? It's a great moment, and the book is full of them.
This review can be seen in online form at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview18
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Damned Good Show Toby Clements The Telegraph 20th September 2003
There are so many forgettably bad novels written about the Second World War (tally-ho chaps, let's give Jerry what for! Donner and Blitzen! Himmel! Aaargh! etc, etc) that you pick up a book like this with a picture of jolly pilots standing before some kind of bomber with a certain amount of shame. Which is pity, because Derek Robinson writes icily sarcastic, black-edged prose and his subject is really the human condition in all its frailities and strengths, tested in extreme circumstances.
Of ourse, war is involved and people are killed, but it is usually an accident, a cock-up, an oversight. He creates a particularly English atmosphere: heroic, determined, steadfast, but also feeble, chippy and embarrassed. This is terrific, rigorous stuff, full of telling research and sharp insight. It is also mordantly funny and, in its way, as loud an anti-battle cry as Catch 22.
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How did they do it?
Mark Connelly Times Literary Supplement 20th December 2002
Dcrek Robinson has written a series of fascinating novels on aerial combat in the First and Second World Wars; his hallmarks are thorough research, black humour and good stories. His Royal Flymg Corps trilogy provides a compelling picture of life in the infant air service in all its glory and squalor. Paul Fussell has praised the high level of authenticity of the novels, likening them to the memoirs of those with first-hand knowledge of war.
Robinson's two Second World War novels, Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight, followed a Spitfire squadron from 1939 as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force to France. through the Battle of Britain to service in North Afnca. As with his earlier work, these novels set out to destroy long-cherished myths and flattering images, and they do this with great zest. Far from filling his pages with strong, phlegmatic types who fly over the Channel for a quick dogfight with the Luftwaffe before returning to a late breakfast and sing-song in the mess. Robinson shows spiteful, childish, petty-minded and incompetent pilots who are far removed from John Gregson and Jack Hawkins in Angels One Five. There are no Kenneth Mores chewing on pipe stems in a bulldog-breed manner, stoically stumping across airfields to faithful, humpbacked Hurricanes. Instead of tally-hos and bullets spraying Messerschmitts, Robinson's pilots are hindered by misleading orders from out-of-touch commanders.
Although A Piece of Cake is an exciting book it leaves the reader asking: "How did they win the Battle of Bntain?" By injecting some honesty into the national memory of that battle and rescuing the young men of RAF Fighter Command from the Brylcreem Boy image, Robinson would say that he has erected a more effective memorial to those who saved the country from defeat. But I am not so sure. The original myth is not pernicious and it honours those who fought at the sharp end. Perhaps that is why the lavish television adaptation of A Piece of Cake was not received with much enthusiasm.
A similar spirit of cheery iconoclasm fills Robinson's new book, only this time Bomber Command is the subject (or target). There is, however, one great obstacle in the way of any author attempting a fictionalised account of life in Bomber Command - Len Deighton's novel Bomber (1970), a brilliant account of one raid which follows the lives of both the bomber crew and its victims. Robinson stands up to comparisons well. His story is interesting and told in a lively and droll manner, and as ever his research is sound. Occasionally the weight of his information overloads the novel so that it reads like a campaign history turned into fiction. The informed reader will be able to tick off the elements historians consider significant - the Butt Report. the disastrous daylight raids against German shipping, the absence of accurate weather forecasting resulting in catastrophic navigation problems, and so on. (Given this commitment to accuracy, it is jarring to see the name of Bomber Command's C-in-C misspelt Sir Richard Peirce rather than Sir Richard Pierse.
It is ironic that in trying to dispel myths and stereotypes Robinson has created some of his own. Dogs making a mess are a favourite, as are dysfunctional relationships between men and women, fast cars and estranged pilots who start to act in bizarre ways. But Damned Good Show has some good moments which stop it becoming a routine account. There is an interesting subplot, based on the work of the Crown Film Unit, in which there are characters who resemble Brendan Bracken, Ian Dalrymple and Humphrey Jennings. Robinson has never been very sympathetic to the media in his novels and this is no exception; Harry Watt's documentary masterpiece Target for Tonight is lampooned as hopelessly inaccurate propaganda. Watt may have provided a rosy view of Bomber Command but his film was not a total fabrication, and, as Robinson admits, in his own way Watt paid a sincere tribute to the men of Bomber Command. Similarly Damned Good Show is a salute to those who laboured, suffered and sacrificed themselves to keep us free. But, as with all Robinson's work, it is a crooked salute.